Collector’s Preview: Thursday, November 4, 6-8pm
Opening Reception: Friday, November 5, 6-9pm (in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur)
Artists’ Talk: Saturday, November 6, 2pm
Mercury Twenty Gallery is proud to announce the first in a number of exhibitions prepared by visiting curators. For November, 2010, DeWitt Cheng, who writes for Art Ltd., Artillery, Sculpture, VisualArtSource.com, ArtBusiness.com, as well as the local weekly newspaper, The East Bay Express, and teaches at UC Berkeley Extension, has selected Oakland sculptor Andrew Werby, some of whose "Juxtamorphic" sculptures will be exhibited in public here for the first time. Admirers of fantasy and high tech alike will find them beautiful, strange and enthralling.
Werby, who studied at California College of Arts (formerly California College of Arts and Crafts), combines traditional techniques of carving and casting in plaster, wood and bronze with three-dimensional digital scanning, modeling and rendering. As the founder of United Artworks (ComputerSculpture.com), a discount retail distributor for digital sculpture programs and equipment (including the futuristic-looking tripled-lensed 3D scanning camera), he is active in spreading information about the new technology, which he employs it in his own works:
“As a sculptor, my work has primarily involved the use of natural forms and textures in assemblage,” says Werby. “You can see some of the pieces I’ve done in this “juxtamorphic” style at UnitedArtworks.com. The work on that site was done using traditional techniques: molding and casting the original forms, assembly and recasting in various materials. Since becoming involved with computers, 3-D scanners, and CNC milling machines, I’ve stuck with this basic idea, but have scanned the source objects instead of casting them, have assembled the objects or pieces of them in a 3-D modeling program, and made physical parts from the digital models using CAM software and CNC hardware. Sometimes these parts are incorporated in a piece directly, or they may be used as stamps or molds.”
The works in this show will present a varied sampling of Werby’s Juxtamorphs, analog and digital “collage” sculptures that organically combine the shapes, textures and colors of natural materials as disparate as trilobite shells and sea-fan leaves; mangos and sunflowers; allosaurus claws and duckbill dinosaur, mastodon, and cave-bear teeth; and cow thighbones.
